TaPRA Research Prize for Editing (Essay Collections and Special Issues)
This prize is for an edited collection (a book of essays or a special issue of a journal) that defines new approaches in research in theatre and performance, opening up new areas of work and new lines of enquiry.
PRIZES
2022
WINNERS
Melissa Blanco Borelli, Bryce Lease and Royona Mitra
“Outing Archives/Archive Outings”, special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review, 31:1–2
Combining decolonial and queer approaches to the archive, this timely and ground-breaking collection expands the field and generates new knowledge in rethinking the archive and the activity of archiving. Circulating around the idea of ‘outing’, the contributions extend the idea of the archive beyond western-centric thinking to include new spatial, embodied and historical dimensions and centre marginalised perspectives and global concerns. Outing Archives, Archives Outing is outstanding for the clarity, originality, and political urgency of the approach to scholarship that is modelled in this collection. The purpose of the issue is persuasively and clearly articulated in the introduction. It is explicitly intended to define new directions for the field, and it demonstrably succeeds in providing other scholars with new bridges and pathways. Collectively, the strengths of each individual piece accumulate into a powerful intervention into not only the kinds of content that are considered for scholarship, but also a sensitive and politically performative practice of scholarship itself.
RUNNERS-UP
Dassia N. Posner, Kevin Bartig and Maria De Simone
for Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev, Indiana University Press, 2021
This fascinating and innovative volume combines theatre history, ethnomusicology and narratological approaches to the evolution of The Love for Three Oranges opera, tracking the history and development of the work from Italy to Russia to Chicago. Each section of volume offers new insights on the work of Gozzi, Meyerhold and Prokofiev but together they work cumulatively to produce a coherent project. The volume is impressive for its inclusion of a range of non-anglophone voices and the work of the editors doubling as translators to bring new insights is significant. The tripartite structure is highly original and models a transhistorical and interdisciplinary approach to theatre and performance scholarship. The book is beautifully designed and produced and is a delight to read.
SHORTLISTED
Clare Parfitt
Cultural Memory and Popular Dance: Dancing to remember, dancing to forget (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
WINNING
The Prize
TBC
2021
Theron Schmidt
for Agency: A Partial History of Live Art (University of Chicago Press, 2019)
The judging panel agreed that Agency: A Partial History of Live Art is an elegant and beautifully presented mapping of important themes and topics in Live Art. The lens of agency provides an original perspective as well as providing a well-deserved tribute to the work of the Live Art Development Agency. The editorial strategy for the volume is very clearly articulated and the variety of voices and registers was extremely well curated and framed. The work is very precisely edited with an excellent introduction to each sub-section. All the elements, including the images, are effectively integrated in a coherent totality.
Siân Adiseshiah and Jaqueline Bolton
debbie tucker green: Critical Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
Katie Beswick
Housing, Performance and Activism (Studies in Theatre and Performance, 2020, 40:1)
Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson
The Methuen Drama Handbook of Theatre History and Historiography (Methuen Drama, 2019)
2019
Richard Gough
for Performance Research 24(3), On Reflection: Turning 100
Both the shortlisting panel and the final judging panel found this special issue of PR a monumental achievement. The judges commended the ambition and innovation of its concept: to commission an original essay on each of the themes chosen for each of 100 special issues of the journal. This framework produced a fascinating set of essays that were often formally innovative and conceptually rich. Excellence in editing is shown not only by the management of such an enormous project, but also in the layers of a plurality of inter-generational voices speaking to the edited work of the journal itself. The result is an encyclopaedic but creatively anarchic view of the field. Like the issue itself, theatre and performance studies is revealed to be interesting, odd, motile, dynamic, and plural. On Reflection: Turning 100 is less a guide to theatre and performance studies than a wander, and thus opens new possibilities for editorial practice.
Geraldine Brodie and Emma Cole
Adapting Translation for the Stage (Routledge, 2017)
Kate Dorney and Maggie Gale
Vivien Leigh: Actress and Icon (Manchester University Press, 2017)
Scott Palmer and Joslin McKinney
Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design (Bloomsbury, 2017)
2017
Maria Delgado & Joanne Tompkins
for Contemporary Theatre Review: The Politics, Processes and Practices of Editing: special edition. 25:1, February 2015.
The collection notes the relative invisibility of the labour of editing, and goes a long way to bring, in the words of the sub-title, the politics, processes and practices of editing into the light. The introduction effectively maps debates and issues, arguing for editing, in all its many forms, as one of the main ways in which academic disciplines mark where they are and chart a path to the future: as one of the sub-headings has it, it is about ‘The value of editing/ [as well as] the editing of value’, and as such it is a timely and welcome contribution to ongoing debates in the discipline about the value of editing to our research culture.
Helen Nicholson & Anna Harpin
for Performance and Participation: Practices, Audiences, Politics (Palgrave, 2016)
Alyson Campbell & Stephen Farrier
for Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives On Where Performance Leads Queer (Palgrave, 2016)
MAKE A
Nomination
Only current TaPRA members can submit nominations for our awards or elections. Each nomination requires a seconder, who must also be a current member.
TaPRA 2023 at Leeds
Our 2023 conference will be hosted in partnership with the University of Leeds.
TaPRA 2023 at Leeds
Our 2023 conference will be hosted in partnership with the University of Leeds.
